The welfare of individual man has no meaning apart from its relation to the benefit of mankind as a progressive whole. If a man participate in the common habits of his fellows, he must take his share in those dangers to individual existence which the development of his race necessitates. The advantages which we to-day derive from our employment of social and scientific contrivances common to civilised communities have been wrought from the effort and suffering of men of past times. We are debtors to our ancestors who, by their own labour and sacrifice, have given us a better equipment for the battle of life than was their own inheritance from their forefathers. We are under an obligation to our race which, whether we discharge it willingly or no, is drawn from us by the operation of forces beyond our own control, as the just equivalent of our gain. We cannot separate ourselves, humanly speaking, from our kind. Inasmuch as the spirit of humanity reaches out towards immortality from one generation to another, our lives are not our own. Rather are they hostages to fortune, to that evolutionary principle which, while allowing us as individuals to participate in the benefits actualised to-day as the results of the labours of past generations of men, also exacts from us our own contribution towards the slow perfecting of our kind.
It is indubitable that suffering is an important factor in the evolution of the mind as well as of the body of man. Inefficiency and defect in scientific and social contrivances are made apparent by accident, which, having entailed human suffering, is therefore productive of effort to rectify the cause of danger, and thus of reducing the risk of further punishment.
Could perfect correspondence between an organism and its environment be perpetually maintained, physical death could only occur as the final stage in the gradual decline of the medium of the spirit. Such natural dissolution appears to be part of the order of manifested life, requisite for its continuity and for the evolution of species, and necessary for the development of the spiritual desire for immortality. It is not of necessity a painful process, since the slow decline in physical vitality implies a corresponding decrease in sensibility, or, in other words, a decrease of physical consciousness. Premature death, the result of disease and accident, and accompanied by more or less suffering, constitutes the wages of ignorance, and only in this sense can pain and death be said to be a punishment for sin inflicted by God. If man, individually and socially, does not know how to protect himself from danger, he must pay the penalty for ignorance. Only a perfected organism, maintaining a permanent correspondence with its environment, could be permanently capable of combating physical death. And since the cycle of the birth and death of all forms of life constitutes the central principle of natural law, it is difficult to imagine an eventual eternal preservation of individual physical life to be the ordained end of the evolution of humanity.